Twitter is a popular content hosting silo that started with short plain text notes in 2006 and over time added auto-linking URLs, @-names, replies, photo & video posts, and much more.
Twitter used to be most well known for being originally limited to 140 characters (even though actually originally it was limited to "156 minus the length of your username characters". Over 11 years later, the limitation was raised to 280.
Why
Why use Twitter? Besides all the usual social media silo reasons like "everyone is on there", see what people come up with when they ask why am I using Twitter:
How to
How to export your data
Download all your tweets
- Go to: https://twitter.com/settings/account
- near the bottom of the page there may be a "Your Twitter archive" section
- See the (Request your archive) button? Click it.
- Wait some amount of time for a link to your archive to show up in your email associated with the account.
The Twitter archive is made of per month JSON files. It can be used as a way to PESOS a whole Twitter history, even though POSSE is the recommended way to do it.
The most interesting things in the JSON twitter archive are:
- both long and shortened URLs
- "new" RTs are also written the classic Way, making easy to republish them in a PESOS way.
- every related information needed to rebuild a conversation
After you download your archive, you can update in using a Ruby Gem called GrailbirdUpdater.
Download Direct Messages
- You can use this method to download DMs from Twitter. It is complicated to set up and involves registering a new Twitter application. It can only archive about a year's worth of DMs.
Backup using t command line tool
See: https://github.com/sferik/t#using-t-for-backup
You can also export your lists with the "t" command line tool:
- List all your lists, in long format
- t lists -l
- List all the members of a list, in long format
- t list members -l following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`
How to unlock your account
If going to twitter.com or any Twitter profile page (e.g. @IndieWebCamp) or any tweet permalink redirects you to https://twitter.com/account/access with a message like: Your account has been locked. then your account has been locked.
If your account is locked (e.g. a new account), try:
- file a support request, explain what you did immediately beforehand, and
- reply to the email confirming your support request
Note your personal experience here so we can track how effective this is:
- 2016-10-27 @PostTypeDisc unlocked
- ...
DURING: steps you may want to take while waiting for your account to get unlocked:
- Remove Twitter from your contact page (to avoid people sending DMs that you cannot access)
- ...
AFTER: steps you should take after your account is unlocked:
- Re-authorize Bridgy (if you happen to use it)
- Go https://brid.gy/ , log in with Twitter and click the buttons on your user page to enable listening and publishing
- ...
Details:
